Stress fracture

FORGET the potato famine. Or growing, picking, and canning your food for the coming winter. Or having to track it down in the snow. Or having it track you down in the snow.

Forget the Cossacks invading the next town over. Or the Army that just demanded your country’s surrender. Or the Army that just demanded your signature on the dotted line, private. Don’t you know you’re volunteering for conscription?

Forget the Black Death. Or the flu of 1918. Or the third cholera pandemic of 1852-1860.

Forget having your teeth fall out by age 20. Or a miserable birth rate. Forget that stepping on a sharp rock might mean a painful death weeks later. Forget that drinking the water might kill you.

Forget the wolf at the door. A literal wolf. Or maybe a crocodile that drags you under as you walk along a river bank.

Forget all that. A survey of 2,000 millennials in this country shows that they believe that their lives are more stressful right now than ever before.

The causes for their stress? No. 6 was slow WiFi. No. 8 was forgetting passwords. No. 10 was forgetting a phone charger. The biggest worry for millennials, according to the survey, was losing a credit card.

The joke is that we’re not kidding. The survey said that 58 percent of these young people actually believe their lives are more stressful than ever before.

Our question: How would they know?